Parts – The Clonus Horror: Special Edition (aka Clonus)
Picture:
B- Sound: C+ Extras: B Film: B+
Particularly
since the 1980s, one of the biggest assaults on free thought and individuality
has been the idea of any text or ideas of a group (especially when it comes to
power elites) doing something for their own good at the expense of the
individual, even to the point to where they are tortured or killed, is written
off in reactionary form as “paranoid” or otherwise dramatically discreditable because the individual has said it. Yet, some things just get worse and worse,
out of greed, carelessness, intended & organized efforts or any combination
thereof. After all, do unto others if
you can get away with it, right?
In real
life, the individual is more assaulted than ever before and in the 1970s, when
Civil Rights were at their peak movement, so many of the ugly things happening
now were considered impossible because people were more “educated” or “knew
better” or would “never let things get that bad” because those who knew better
would stand up for what is right.
Unfortunately, as the cinema of individuality and (as Robert Kolker’s
book title states) of loneliness was eroded by flashy commercial fare and the
biggest rollbacks of any existential thought since the Hollywood witch
hunts. If Film Noir (1941 – 1958) was
the first great genre of individualistic thinking and maturity, Science Fiction
and many corollary Horror films from the same later period (1965 – 1982) really
became it successor. This is why along
with all the recent bad Horror films that have been explicitly and blatantly
remade and ruined, there has been a less critically and commercially successful
effort to rewrite Science Fiction history and its most effective works of the
period.
Even
before this new dark period, though, the Science Fiction films of the time were
not given the full credit they deserved and even scholars on the genre blew it
on certain films. It is enough that even
smart commercial fare with minor problems like Michael Anderson’s Logan’s Run (1976) or Richard
Fleischer’s Soylent Green (1973,
reviewed elsewhere on this site) are made out to be more of a joke than they
are (a point of view that changes when one serious watches the films) but an unintended effect of the first Star Wars (1977) was to write off
anything that did not have impressive visual effects. Even a great space opera is not a mature,
adult science fiction work, but we now see from all the bad digital and Lucas’
own endless touchups of his Star Wars
films that this can become a sinister thing.
In
Science Fiction films that we could say have a modernist look like Logan’s Run, where the future looks
like what we now know as a shopping mall, a surprising number of smart, classic
films with that look were made. Even if
they were from the time period they were shot in, like Demon Seed, little pieces of that look surfaced as an idea of the
future. Though it has one of the
smallest budgets of all Science Fiction films of the 1970s, Robert S. Fiveson’s
Parts – The Clonus Horror: Special
Edition (aka Clonus) from 1979
is one of the best of these intelligent, thinking Science Fiction films and
maybe the most shockingly forgotten.
This was not because it was overshadowed by Ridley Scott’s Alien either, as it is certainly a peer
of that film and Larry Cohen’s It’s
Alive.
A few
years ago, Mondo Macabro issued the film on DVD and it was so successful that
they have issued this new upgraded edition.
Besides being slowly rediscovered by true movie lovers, a controversy
arouse when DreamWorks (towards the end of their independence) released Michael
Bay’s The Island (2005) and sharper
critics named Clonus (the film’s
original title, as we shall refer to it henceforth) as the film The Island was blatantly ripping
off. More on that in a minute.
The film
is about a young man named Richard (Timothy Donnelly) who lives in a world
where everybody is happy (and white! The
film is not racist, but about a racist elite, though there is some irony that
this group all wears Adidas shirts) playing games and living a happy, healthy
lifestyle. This group now looks like
they belong in a hair commercial from the 1970s or a beach group from an
original Charlie’s Angels episode,
but that style identification goes right out the window when we find out how
childlike they are. As the title gives
away, they are clones and Richard is about to become self-aware.
In two
interesting evil turns, Dick Sargent of the TV classic Bewitched is surprisingly effective as the head of the facility,
the evil mad scientist up to no good.
Peter Graves (taking another groundbreaking work on worthy of the early
season of Mission: Impossible) is
presidential candidate to be Jeffrey Knight, a willing puppet president who (as
the opening montage indicates) is involved in the project. Reminiscent of the obviously cold way robots
are treated in the original film versions of Westworld, Futureworld, The Stepford Wives, these clones (like
the replicants of Ridley Scott’s Blade
Runner would be by their creators two years later) are treated like things,
property, objects and are as disposable as garbage. Of course, this is a metaphor for how the
defenseless in freer societies are treated, but speaks as well about having a
healthy distrust for the establishment and big money when it comes to life and
personal preservation.
To prove
this point in the best Orwellian tradition (Animal Farm as much as 1984),
all the clones are promised that if they work hard and train hard, they will
get to the paradise known as America. Interestingly,
the Fiveson/Ron Smith/Bob Sullivan/Myrl A. Schreibman screenplay presents this
paradise as a laid-back (sex implied, especially pre-AIDS) heaven-on-earth in a
film montage reminiscent of the conditioning films in The Parallax View. Ironically, when the clones applaud to the
happy ending being told what they want to hear with all its false promises,
there is a sort of echo to be of 1980s mall movie cinema meant to inoculate and
keep the audience childish.
Of
course, this film is not intentionally political, but certainly (and
thankfully) left of center in an intelligent way and what happens by default
when you are ambitiously intelligent in filmmaking. That is why I believe it has been
particularly targeted to be ignored and revised because it is too smart and
prolific a work. Paulette Breen plays a
clone from another camp named Lean who Richard falls for and vice versa, but
the corporation secretly responsible for the Clonus Project is as vicious as
dark forces in Nicolas Roeg’s The Man
Who Fell To Earth (1976, also reviewed on this site) will do what they have
to do to stay in power and play God with other’s lives against their will.
Keenan
Wynn is the retired reporter who takes in Richard when he reaches the outside
and David Hooks is very good as the Knight’s brother Richard, a professor who
questions the morality of cloning entire people just for body parts at the
service of the few who can afford it and do this selling secretly. The acting is good all around and just right
for the film. At the time, only so many
people knew what cloning was and the film had both a limited theatrical
release, and then barely made it to TV.
This critic remembers seeing it on The CBS Late Movie when they were
showing reruns of shows like The Avengers
and Return Of The Saint.
Many
laughed off that a person could even be cloned at the time, but we all know now
the debate is wide open and intertwined with other issues like Abortion, Civil
Rights and Stem Cell Research. Recently,
the idea of having only organs instead of entire people cloned has surfaced,
but the truth is many who would want to have longer lives might not care what
the costs were with the organizational tendency towards inhumanity in
general. Fiveson very cleverly does not
try for much illicit appeal to pity, preachiness or pre-calculated
formula. He makes a very intelligent
film for a very low budget (remarkable for less than $300K in 1979 dollars on
35mm film) that still looks better than many big budget films today, especially
Sci-Fi junk that has been digitized to death.
Also very
important is that Fiveson does not pull any punches where the Horror or terror
elements are concerned, echoing the then-recent thriller Coma (1978) that also addressed the organ issue. It is still very chilling and terrifying
without cheap tricks and the more you get into it, the better it is. The performances are very effective and the
film has a healthy cynicism as well as healthy approach that says (like Peter
Hyams’ Capricorn One) people will
not tolerate what is exposed when they know the real horror of it, but that the
predators will not give up either.
Though bloated mainstream films have spent the last quarter century
denying this, the reality has not changed, even when real life people have been
treated like the cloned no-nothings in this film. Clonus
is a film way ahead of its time, even ahead of Blade Runner, becoming more relevant all the time.
The
anamorphically enhanced 1.66 X 1 image has vague black bars on the side, but
looks very good for its age and was shot in 35mm negative by cinematographer Max
Beauford. Some of the shots have good
form, while others are static 1970s-styled shots, but both work very well. The Dolby Digital 1.0 Mono is credited as
Stereo on the package, but only some extras and the audio commentary are
so. Despite that, the sound is good for
its age, including a very effective music score by Hod David Schudson. Extras include a full-length director’s
commentary, original theatrical trailer, previews for other Mondo Macabro
titles, a stills gallery and an on-camera interview (35:25) with Fiveson.
So how
much of a rip-off of this film was Michael Bay’s The Island was of this?
Very, except for all the ideological negations, of course along with
many parts of Logan’s Run. Like many
recent Sci-Fi films that try to supplant and negate the ideas being said by the
films they rip off (Aeon Flux,
reviewed on this site, is one of them) with fancy action sequences and digital
effects done to death, The Island
negates the point about an America promised by undelivered with the title
location being promised instead. We will
review that film at a later date, but Clonus
is the film to catch and is a key reissue all serious collections need to add.
- Nicholas Sheffo
